Quarantine makes a new normal, but for how long?

I think it’s safe to say that the usual day-to-day life of every person in the US and Canada has been subverted in one way or another by the near ubiquity of the novel coronavirus. I’ve seen everything from people rushing to the market to snag the last of the toilet paper to those who have effectively been forced indoors due to state-wide efforts to stifle the spread of the contagion. All of this has become the new norm.

I did not start taking the coronavirus seriously until about two and a half weeks ago, when I flew to Lansing, Michigan, to visit my girlfriend for spring break. It was a bit unsettling to see so many people in the Minneapolis International Airport with masks on, eyeing others with a certain amount of suspicion. I already have a strong dislike for flying, so I tried my best not to compound my worries with a virus that has, at the time of my writing this, killed 11,184 people.

The first Lansing-based report of a patient who tested positive for the coronavirus came about a week after I arrived. It was then that my girlfriend and I decided that we would play it safe and stay inside for the foreseeable future. We have gone on walks around the area and visited the grocery store, for curbside pick-up of essentials, but our new life has been, for the most part, spent in front of a laptop or television, hunting for our next binge-worthy show, working on schoolwork. I am a graduate student, while she's working on her PhD.  

When we are not stationed in front of a screen, we have set a goal of reading fifty pages per day. This time of isolation seems no better time to catch up on the historical essentials I’ve put off for the last few years—Thomas Paine’s political writings and William Shirer’s 1250-page magnum opus, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (wish me luck!).

Our experience has been a much different one than many in our community. As we were walking around our apartment complex a few days ago, we noticed a group of college kids lugging a keg behind them—likely making their way toward a day-party. Out the window, life seems to be carrying on as usual. People are jogging and walking dogs and driving just as they would any other day of the week. And it’s difficult to decide whether they just don’t care or if they don’t feel the pandemic to be that big of a deal.

We are thankfully paid by our universities, since we both teach, but a couple of my friends are having to tackle these circumstances in other, more unique ways.

My friend, Mike, who lives in Kingston, Ontario, has two twin boys he’s been having to look after for the last couple weeks. He told me he’d been keeping an eye on the situation with the virus since December, but had not taken it seriously until it reached “the shores of North America.”

He decided to keep his boys home from daycare just two weeks ago, anticipating that the pandemic was inevitably going to penetrate his local community. A week later, Ontario ordered the shutdown of all schools. This meant that Mike was also not going to report to work, since he has employment at one of the local high schools.

But his fiancée, who is a support professional for youth, has still been required to work part time by driving around town to see different clients. Mike has had to take “over the majority of the responsibilities when it comes to cooking, and cleaning. I normally work 45 to 60 hour weeks, and often am not able to contribute in this regard as much as I’d like to.”

The clear upside is that he’s been able to spend more time with his kids that he’s not usually afforded throughout the regular work week, but he’s expressed clear concern for his fiancée and the possibility that she may be exposed to the virus.

Living in a rural area just outside of town, Mike has been able to take the boys outside to walk the dogs without having to worry about coming into contact with anyone else. He shared that “once the boys go to bed, the house is clean and tidy, and dinner is made, I scroll through Twitter and binge-watch HBO and Netflix.” He qualified this short spurt of freedom he has to himself with the fact that he cannot play his PS4, since his boys shoved coins into the disk drive. Skyrim would be his game of choice were it a possibility.

The one time in the last two weeks Mike has left his house was to buy dog food from Costco. He was stunned to find that all the shelves were “well-stocked, aside from toilet paper,” and the “lines had no more than two or three people in each.” This is in stark contrast to the viral videos that have been blasted across social media.

Mike and his family have taken the social distancing strategy seriously, and have decided to “do this for as long as it takes for this situation to resolve, as difficult and tedious as it has been.”

The world isn’t going to end because of this virus, but it has certainly forced us to think about the way we usually spend our time and how easily it is flipped on its head. There’s no telling how long this is going to last, but there is perhaps an upside to all of it. We are able to spend more time with those we care about, and we have the opportunity to take up hobbies we may never have otherwise. We have time to finish that show we’ve been wanting to get through for the past few weeks or finally start a book we’ve put off, assuming it was too much of a commitment between work and kids and community activities.